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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   30222 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Most people have never heard of Nash equilibrium, let alone understand what a stable Nash equilibrium is. Most people who choose red are just trying to act selfishly and most people choosing blue are just trying to act altruistically, which means it's crazy to argue that one action is correct or incorrect using game theory -- the vast majority of actors are not rational!

"Everyone just choose red" is not a tenable solution in the real world.

Why are people making this into a moral judgement? If the poll asked me "Would you kill this adorable fluffy little kitten with the big eyes to save your own life?" - well I'm not answering that one. But it's not that kind of fucking Sophie's Choice, it's "pick red or blue in a game that has no consequences for the real world".

Sincerely, the more smarmy justifications I'm reading from the blues, the less I like them as people because all the worst finger-wagging Nanny Is Watching instincts are coming out in them. It's not enough to argue that it's the optimal strategy to pick blue if you assume some people out of the group will pick blue; no, it has to be made into "reds are selfish, blues are altruistic, kiss my upright and high-minded ass and tell me how fantastic I am".

How dare those people believe that picking the option that keeps 100% of participants alive is superior! Nannies! Smarms!

Have you ever entertained a thought that not everything others do is for your approval?

For what it’s worth, my main point was that “it’s okay for me to take the red pill because everyone doing that is optimal” is completely inapplicable to the real world, and hence an obvious rationalization. Not that one side was evil or good, just that this particular defense is balderdash.

I realize that it’s kind of hard to say that without coming off as insulting to red pillers. I’d think you would be more sympathetic though, since you did the mirror image and accused all blue pillers of virtue signaling.

Just because people don’t understand game theory terms doesn’t mean game theory cannot explain actions.

No but it means "It's okay that I took the redpill because it's the game theoretic optimal solution (and so everyone else will do it too)" is totally divorced from reality.

The question is does game theory model accurately model human behavior. If yes, then regardless of whether people know what a Nash equilibrium is, it will still exist. If no, then it won’t.

"Everyone just choose red" is not a tenable solution in the real world.

Why?

Good point.

I'd still pick red though.

"Everyone just choose red" is not a tenable solution in the real world.

"Everyone just choose blue" isn't a tenable solution in the real world either. In point of fact, the real world doesn't have a lot of "tenable solutions" of any sort. Mostly people eat shit.

Which is why you don't need everyone to choose blue, just over half the people, which is a much more tenable solution.

It's more tenable than getting everyone to choose red, but maximizing the number of blues is much higher-risk than maximizing the number of reds. If people commit to writing the blues off, you get very close to everyone choosing red, as the apparent upside of blue drops like a rock. People committing to maximizing blue introduces serious tail-risk of calamity.

Likely minimal losses versus unlikely but very large ones. Which is worse?

Perhaps this is harsh, but there's also the fact that if we're talking about adults the people who would pick blue in the first place would likely be a tiny subset of people (suicidal people, mentally retarded people, etc) whose QALYs are realistically fairly limited. I'd say "Maybe we could just not try to pull off some incredible coordination feat which might turn out horrible for marginal gains" is fairly reasonable.

I think of it more as "we benefit also from cautionary examples". Whoever picks blue has volunteered to demonstrate why picking red is the correct choice.

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